Visualization and comparison of geospatial data

Abstract

Every second, a mind-numbing amount of data concerning the real world is gathered worldwide. Everything from the speed of cars through a road junction, to the geographical position of African lions, are registered and stored on enormous servers. This data have been collected to serve many different needs and purposes and so, the possible formats for the representation of the data vary greatly. Some data represents a single point on a road section, such as accidents and locations of zebra crossings, while another set of data could represent directional geospatial data, such as force and direction of wind or ocean currents. Often, a simple data registration also contains multiple properties. Weather data collected from a single location could for example include properties such as humidity, temperature, precipitation and dew point temperature.

This paper will explore how to reliably visualize and compare arbitrary properties from different data collections belonging to the municipality of Stavanger. Easy integration of new sources will be possible, but for the scope of this paper, the source will exclusively be open data made available by Statens Vegvesen. How to properly visualize different data sets using virtual reality will also be discussed, meaning that both user experience and GUI will be considered. The goal will be to make a program that is both user-friendly and delivers intuitive functionality.